‘No Man’s Sky’ Review: You Don’t Play It, You Live With It

Two GQ writers try and decide whether they enjoy the (literally) biggest game of all time.

Kevin Nguyen, digital deputy editor:No Man's Sky, the game touting eighteen quintillion planets, was finally released after seemingly eighteen quintillion years in development. The first trailer was the reason I bought a PlayStation 4. And now it’s finally arrived, I am… not sure if I like it?

Joshua Rivera, GQ contributor: I'm really glad this game came out while Twitter is still a thing, because watching people figure out if they like the game or not in real time has been a delight. Once the dust settled from that incredible trailer, the question everyone has had about No Man's Sky has been, "Okay, but what do you do in this game?” In a way, it has been very clear from the beginning: You explore a giant universe. But of course, "exploring" in this game is a very complicated process, and HERE OUR TROUBLES BEGAN. So: How long did it take you to figure out how to, like… do stuff?

Kevin: I appreciate that No Man’s Sky forgoes a straight-up tutorial, but I could’ve used a little more hand-holding. At the beginning of the game, you’re dropped on a random planet and your tin-can spaceship is busted as fuck. You get vague instructions on what you need to do to fix it—mostly fetch quests to gather materials, and then crafting those resources into other resources—but the most confusing part of the game is just figuring out how the inventory menus work. Visually, No Man’s Sky looks like a dream; too bad it’s hobbled by the UI from your nightmares.

Anyway, it took me a goddamn hour and a half to repair my ship. One of the rarer minerals you need at the beginning of the game is heridium. On the procedurally generated planet I was on, the closest heridium deposit was a thirty-minute walk away. So I walked thirty minutes there, thirty minutes back, and let me tell you, that was not even a little bit enjoyable or fun. Was your intro to the game as rough as mine?

Joshua: Yes and no! I wandered for a solid half-hour, but mostly because I didn't know what all the elements were, or what the icons indicating where they were meant. It also took me forever to figure out how to fix and make things, and your inventory of stuff is a damn mess. You have stuff in your bag. Stuff on your ship. Stuff in your gun? It's like that George Carlin bit. You are zipping about the universe, collecting stuff. Only, if you play the game for more than maybe an hour, you run out of places to put it!

Imagine you are going to explore the cosmos. Any form of shelter or civilization is, at best, miles and miles away across inhospitable terrain, or the vacuum of space. You'd want a big bag with you, right? A mean rucksack to carry the essentials, in addition to whatever you scavenge for later use like the sci-fi Robinson Crusoe you are. Right? Too bad the game gives you a chic handbag that can only fit, like, ten things in it. And look, I know you can technically expand your capacity for carrying stuff, but I've played like eight hours and I've only found ONE measly backpack expansion. Do you want to follow me around and help me carry stuff?

Games often work hard to make you feel bigger and more powerful, but in No Man's Sky, you will always be small.

Kevin: Yeah, I feel like I should be motivated to buy bigger ships and guns instead of adding more slots to a menu. But those things aside, after my boring introduction to Space Handbag Simulator 2016, I started to get into a real groove. The game didn’t get any less boring, but it did become deeply relaxing. I fell into a nice rhythm of arriving on new planets, knocking off a few objectives, gathering a few resources, all while smelling the Technicolor roses along the way.

As you mentioned, critics voiced early fears that the game would be dull. But instead of trying to liven the game up, I feel like developers Hello Games just leaned into it. And it kind of works? This is definitely more Minecraft than Star Wars (especially because the dogfights in space are a little limp). But I admire the quiet vastness of the whole experience. No Man’s Sky is maybe the only blockbuster game I’ve played that is deliberately isolating.

Joshua: I really do love the bigness of the game, although not in the way that it's been sold. No Man's Sky is both mind-bogglingly complex and simple at the same time—it achieves nigh-infinite variety via a number of variables. After a few hours, you see those variables, and the ways they iterate stop being so interesting. Instead, I love that isolation you were talking about.

Games can be good tools for making the abstract quantifiable, and the vastness of space is really hard to wrap your head around. The game measures distance in the time it takes to traverse it, and although it gives you several means of negotiating that distance (pulse thrusters, for example, can shorten a journey from days to minutes) just knowing that at one of the game's "slower" speeds it will take, say, a month to reach a planet is mind-boggling and cool. Games often work hard to make you feel bigger and more powerful, but in No Man's Sky, you will always be small. How do you feel about all those quintillions of stars and planets?

Kevin: Honestly, I’m not sure how it makes me feel. Like you, I am dumbfounded by the vastness of the game. Space, it turns out, is very empty. The planets are, by and large, very dull. Sure, the fact that they’re procedurally rendered is impressive, but actually traversing them—by ship, by foot—is actually incredibly dull. Each landscape is sparse. You look for small space stations, the occasional moody-ass monolith, and drop pods. After visiting a few different planets, all of the flora and fauna start to look like combinations of each other. You start to know what to expect out of the jungle planet, the desert planet, the ice planet, and so on. No planet has anything resembling actual life—no cities or villages or any form of organization. Basically it’s a universe devoid of culture. There might be 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets in No Man’s Sky generated by a computer, but I’m not totally convinced that they’re all better than one interesting planet designed by a human.

No Man’s Sky was made for people who grew up playing Minecraft instead of Mario.

Joshua: Or at least, a universe full of planets that humans can leave a mark on. Sure, No Man's Sky allows you to name every species of flora and fauna that you are the first to see, and upload that name to the game's servers—but that's just about the only impact you can have. I can't, say, carve out a cave and fill it with stuff I've found for you to find, in the infinitesimally small chance that you would end up on a planet I've visited. Of course, that's probably an unrealistic thing to wish for in a game that already does one impossible thing, but it doesn't change the fact that passage through the universe in No Man's Sky is strangely passive, in spite of all the mining and shooting you can do.

But maybe that's a strength, too. The game is about perspective, and its perspective is that I don't matter all that much. I think it's cool, and ballsy, for a game to ask me to embrace that.

Kevin: Yeah, I keep coming back to the fact that all the things I would want added to the game—multiplayer, more discrete goals, better space dogfights—are things No Man’s Sky has deliberately shied away from. On a Ringer podcast, the game’s creator Sean Murray said that No Man’s Sky was made for people who grew up playing Minecraft instead of Mario. You and I, though, were firmly raised in a world where Nintendo games were the platonic ideal of a video game.

Our complaints about No Man’s Sky certainly echo those of many other video game critics. But then, most of us writing about No Man’s Sky are also of that Mario generation, judging it from two decades of a certain kind of Mario-based expectation. Maybe games criticism hasn’t fully formed the vocabulary with which to confront something like No Man’s Sky. I mean, can you imagine a straight review of Minecraft? There has been plenty of great writing about Minecraft—all of which came much later and was far more essayistic.

Joshua: Absolutely. No Man's Sky was remarkably deliberate in its marketing, and didn't really promise a whole lot more than what it gave us—which was plenty. What's been interesting to see is the way critics and the general public navigate the tension between the reality of the game and their interpretations of what was promised, or the expectations that its eager fans placed upon it.

The Mario/Minecraft generation gap can't be ignored when it comes to modern games, which have been moving away from complete movie-like narratives to more open-ended, ever-changing experiences. Games increasingly have more in common with a sandbox filled with LEGOs than they do a theme-park ride, despite the exorbitant amounts of money still spent on games that look like the latter. It's been a gradual yet massive shift—not only are the kind of popular games changing, but so are the ways they’re played/watched/discussed. It's a change we're still adjusting to, and perhaps even push back against. I think likingNo Man's Sky isn't so much declaring whether or not we think it's "good" as much as it is deciding whether or not we want to live with it, you know?

Kevin: So… are you gonna live with it?

Joshua: I'm not going to definitively stop playing. I like the game, and may take a good long break while I still like it, before its fractal patterns become stale—maybe before I even reach the end of one of its "story" paths. I want to see what Hello Games does with this, I want to see what other people find in it, I want to come up with stupid names for everything and hope my friends find them. But also, that feeling of jumping into your ship and cutting the damn sky open just never gets old. I can't imagine I wouldn't want to do that every couple of months.

Kevin: I agree. I’m not sure I’m satisfied by No Man’s Sky, but I plan to keep playing. So I’ll see you at the center of the universe. Unless I don’t.

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Ralphie

Ralphie has no memory of a phlegmatic moment from childhood but grew up to be described as composed, 'calm, cool, and collected', controlled, serene, tranquil, placid, impassive, imperturbable, unruffled... loves reading, writing, traveling, making friends and sharing thoughts. When he's not working on projects and executing startups, he is researching and writing.